The Pit and the Pendulum Essay - Psychoanalysis of the Narrator in "The Pit and the Pendulum"

In this essay we shall attempt to perform two separate, but not unrelated, tasks. First we shall use the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud to explicate the bizarre and surreal nature of events and emotional states described in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." In doing this we shall demonstrate that the character of the narrator and the events which transpire in the tale can be consistently understood by viewing them in the light of a central doctrine of Freudian psychoanalysis, which Freud himself describes in an opening passage of his paper "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses" in the following manner:

Exhaustive researches during the last few years have led me to recognize that the most immediate and, for practical purposes, the most significant causes of every neurotic illness are to be found in factors arising from sexual life.1

However, there is another strain which runs throughout the story and which is directly responsible for the critical difficulties surrounding the story’s metaphysical resolution. This is a strain of transcendent experience, one that corresponds both in detail and cosmology, to satori experiences observed by Jung in the practice of Zen Buddhism. In fact, as we shall detail in a concluding passage of this essay, a most valid interpretation of the tale’s conclusion can be gleaned by utilizing the theory of synchronicity developed by Jung in his later years with the help of the eminent physicist Neils Bohr.

An initial problem -which we encounter in attempting to analyze the character of the narrator in Poe's tale is the degree of 'objectivity’ which we should attribute to his account. The narrator is the sole source of our knowledge concerning the tale's events, and he himself tells us of the hallucinatory character of his experience, advising us from the outset that he is, "sick unto death with that long agony."2 Despite the admittedly high emotional state of the narrator, are we to take the accounts of mechanisms of torture as 'naturalistic' renderings of events with the dimensions of his cell really closing in upon the protagonist, or are these, in fact, merely metaphorical projections or extensions of his personality with no basis in reality. The distortions of time and space, the gaps in causal relations and perhaps most importantly the narrator's characterization of the pit's tortures as, "moral horrors,"3 distinct from physical horrors all incline us to believe that the tale can be most meaningfully interpreted if the events which transpire in it are taken as reflections of the character’s state of mind, events being linked as in a dream.

Having made the assumption that the tortures described in the tale are to be considered as psychic reflections of the narrator’s mental state, we may well inquire: What then is the Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation which can be put upon the appearance of the story's two predominant mechanisms and symbols, the pit and the pendulum. Perhaps the best approach to this problem is to analyze the textual features of the narrator's account of his judgment after the inquisitional judgment:

Yet for a while I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white -- whiter than the sheet upon which I race these words -- and thin even to the point of grotesqueness; I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate were issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe in deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few imperceptible moments of horror, the soft nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which enwrapped the walls of the apartment.4

We would suggest that the predominant strain of imagery in this passage is sexual with the image of thin-dips, the texture of sable draperies and the writhing motion all being associated with the vagina. We would further suggest that the narrator's account of death and rebirth which immediately succeeds this passage identifies this "apartment" as the equivalent of the womb. What then does this introductory passage from the womb of the apartment into the chamber of awakening consciousness have to do with the mechanisms of torture which dominate the narrator’s cell? Freud gives the answer in the form on the following assertion:

For the events and influences which lie at the root of every psychoneurosis belong net to the present day, but to an epoch of life which is long past and which is as it were, a prehistoric era...

(The entire section is 1894 words.)

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